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April 4, 2003/Nisan 2 5763, Vol. 55, No. 32
Assad places risky bet on Saddam
LESLIE SUSSER
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
JERUSALEM - Syrian President Bashar Assad has inherited much of his late father's parochial paranoia, Israeli analysts argue - but little of his astute political judgment.
In the first Persian Gulf War, the wily Hafez Assad lined up on the side of the American-led coalition, the analysts note, while in the second, Bashar Assad seems to be doing all he can to bait the American superpower.
It could end up costing him dearly.
Judging from his public statements, Assad seems convinced that the Bush administration will not stop at Iraq, and that after an American victory in Baghdad he could be next on the regime-change agenda.
Therefore, when Assad vilifies America and openly aids the Iraqi war effort, he believes he is fighting for his life. In late March, buoyed by what he saw as initial Iraqi success in resisting the American-led invasion, Assad explained the basis of his thinking in a fierce diatribe against Israel and the United States.
The war in Iraq, he told the Lebanese newspaper As-Safir, was an Israeli-American conspiracy "designed to redraw the political map of the Middle East."
In Assad's view, the United States would take Iraq's oil, and Israel would become the dominant regional power.
"After Iraq, it will be the turn of other Arab countries, and I don't rule out the possibility of an American attempt to attack Syria, inspired by Israel," he declared.
When Assad took power in the summer of 2000, analysts pointed to his Western education as a sign that he would be more modern and liberal than his authoritarian father. He would open up Syria's economic and political system, they predicted, and would recognize the benefit of peace with Israel.
But such optimists have been sorely disappointed. An initial political opening has been stifled, and the younger Assad seems even less inclined to contemplate peace with the Jewish state than was his father.
Analysts speculate that that's because Hafez Assad had firsthand experience of Israel's military might from the 1967 and 1973 wars, while his son's formative experiences - such as Israel's response to the first intifada in the early 1990s and its flight from southern Lebanon in 2000 - have been of an Israel unwilling to risk its prosperity in military confrontations and willing to retreat in the face even of light casualties.
Assad clearly sees the American war against Iraq and the Arab-Israeli conflict as part of the same apocalyptic struggle: It is, in his view, a zero-sum game that will benefit either Syria or Israel.
As long as Israel exists, he said in the As-Safir interview, Syria is under threat. He would never be able to trust Israel, he added, "because it was treacherous by nature."
But there's more: Since "Israel controlled the United States through its Jewish lobby," Assad presumably can't trust the United States either.
Given this worldview, it's not surprising that Assad has decided to gamble on Saddam Hussein. In helping the Iraqi war effort, he apparently is hoping that the Americans will be stopped in their tracks and will never reach Baghdad, let alone Damascus.
So Assad has kept Syria's border with Iraq open, making Syria the only country to allow volunteers and war materiel through to help Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein.
Leslie Sudder is the diplomatic correspondant for the Jerusalem Report.
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